PRTG Network Monitor Reviews

We primarily use the solution for monitoring. 

It's easy to implement and configure.

The client list capabilities are excellent. For us, the solution is a good fit.

Technical support has been very helpful so far.

The solution has been stable for the six months that we have used it.

We've found that the product is scalable. 

I get messages from all the things that happened, and we are informed about issues after that fact. We need something that is more predictive. We would prefer if it wasn't a solution that was corrective and instead offered predictive insights so that we can handle problems before they even occur.

We are using EMC storage and we are finding that it is difficult to implement monitoring for it for some reason. If they could work to make that easier, that would be ideal. It should work with commonly used equipment and offer more templates.

Every time there is an update, the templates should also be updated as well.

We've been using the solution for about six months. It hasn't been too long just yet.

The stability has been great. There are no bugs or glitches. We do not find that it crashes or freeze. It's been reliable. The performance is good.

The scalability is good. If a company needs to expand it, it can.

At the moment, we use it with four technicians and we have our own domain to handle. We have a central monitoring system in our IT office.

So far, technical support has been good. We are based in the Netherlands, however, they do offer worldwide support. They are helpful, responsive, and knowledgeable. We've been very happy with the level of attention we can get.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's pretty easy to configure. it's not overly complex or difficult.

The pricing is reasonable so far. It's proven to be a good investment for our company.

Although we aren't actively searching for other solutions, from time to time, we do check the market to see what else is available and compare it to this product.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We're working with the latest version of the solution at this time.

I'd advise new users that, although the setup and configuration are pretty easy, it's a good idea to start with training so that you get to know the product before you begin using it.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten We've been happy with it in general.

PRTG is a very versatile and flexible tool. We have a vast number of users spread over more than 300 installations in India and neighboring countries. We have many different types of customers who use this tool for project control monitoring and other types of network monitoring.

PRTG Enterprise Monitor comes with built-in analytics capability. This means that if there is an incident, it not only tells you that there is an incident, it will also tell you the root cause.  For large networks, this is beneficial as the network team can easily home onto the problem directly without spending time searching for the root cause, which allows them to attend to the problem as the alerts come in. 

Having an Alliance program is very valuable. The Paessler Uptime Alliance Program focuses on making the core network product, which is PRTG, progressively better. It also combines capabilities from any partners in the ecosystem. For example, we have UVexplorer (a US-based company), taking care of network discovery, network topology mapping, and network asset mapping and we have other partners, like CORP-IT, that provide us with the plug-in to monitor SAP and sensors. In other words, it's an ever-expanding network management system.

If you can get everything into a particular environment, you can monitor your factory automation systems; however, they also need to be monitored for maintenance purposes. If you intend to automate factory information, you cannot afford to fail. Monitoring the equipment and receiving dashboard alerts for maintenance is highly advantageous. This is a great feature of PRTG. Currently, we are competing in the market with SolarWinds and ManageEngine. They are good, but we come out winning.

From a security perspective, PRTG provides you complete Secure Socket Layer-based access. If you're monitoring your network or a private network using a BLS cloud, security is automatically ensured because of the way you're deployed.

I don't believe there is much need for improvement. The product is constantly improving. I used to think that the reporting could be quicker, but presently, there is a solution for that, thanks to the SLA plug-in from CORP-IT. The basic reason why PRTG reportings were slow is due to the fact that the reporting engine is built-in as a functionality in the PRTG application. The application does a lot of things, like monitoring and managing the database and it updates your dashboard in real-time.

The last priority goes to the reports. Typically, reporting can wait if there are demands on other aspects of the product, but because of this, the reporting was becoming too slow because it was always the last priority. I used to think that needed to be improved but the formal plug-in has solved this issue. Some customers don't mind the slow reporting, as not everything is urgent. However, if you want faster reporting, the options are available. 

Maybe in the future there will be room for improvement, but currently, there is nothing pressing that I can think of. 

I have been using this solution since 2003. Previously, I used CA, IBM Tivoli, BMC Patrol, and HP OpenView. 

I have not come across any situation which was so bad that PRTG has crashed.  

The stability and security of this solution are intertwined. PRTG is not static, it's always evolving and updating. Basically, the security situation at any given time makes PRTG's functionality vulnerable. Thankfully, they take this as a top priority, providing new solutions all the time. Paessler releases 7 to 8 updates a year to combat this issue. Because of this, I would say we're in lockstep with our security needs which also tie into the stability of the solution.

Presently, PRTG is extremely scalable. In fact, I would boldly say that this is the most scalable network monitoring tool that I know of. 

If you have PRTG on a single server, the server can perform many functions. PRTG has a local probe that probes according to the configuration settings; however, even the best servers cannot take on an infinite load. Thankfully, PRTG offers a remote probe as part of their license return. This has multiple advantages including lessening the load of the server.
For example, should the communication link between the remote probe and PRTG server break down, the local probe will keep on accumulating data locally. When the link to the server is established, all the collected data is then flushed into the core. That is one way of scaling, but keep in mind, that adding multiple remote probes will eventually saturate the core because now you have to manage the data from so many sensors.

 Depending on the types of sensors and monitoring frequency, as your network expands, you can keep adding PRTG digit codes. You can keep adding servers and sensors to focus on monitoring. In my opinion, I don't know of another product where you can do this. Even if you've applied PRTG on multiple servers, you can still manage all of them using a single dashboard.

The initial setup was very easy. What you pay for this product encompasses everything. When we sell this product to a customer, we say "You can do it yourself, you don't need to pay for installation". So far, at least 70% of our customers are able to manage and there are some that don't need our help at all; however, there are occasionally a few customers who email or call us looking for support, in which case, we are always quick to help at no charge. This is all included in the price you pay for this solution. There are no hidden costs and the customers appreciate this.

Downloading and installation take less than five minutes, but after downloading, there is configuration to be done. Installing the software is only one part, about 30 to 35% of the whole picture. Our networking team needs to be organized because this is how we guide our customers in the right direction before the product arrives, which saves them a lot of time. We have a network team, server team, and a storage team. They are very structured and know how to do their job well — they can install some of the largest networks in just three to four hours. In the best-case scenario, it would take them less than a week to install PRTG Excel.

We encourage our customers to use the trial version first, to build a rating. By doing so, when they are ready to purchase the full commercial license, they will be ready to be productive from day one. 

PRTG is now available as PRTG Enterprise Monitor, and the price of it varies depending on the total number of sensors the customer buys. 

PRTG is available as a service network monitoring service in the cloud, with the option of purchasing up to 1000 sensors. For small companies, it's more of a network tool because smaller organizations like to focus on their code builders. Smaller companies cannot afford or attract very technical people to monitor the network with cloud hosting. PRTG can fix that, but it's only good for small workloads.

The process of network management itself has to be organized. You have to organize yourselves in terms of how your network is structured: how do you want to monitor and manage it? Even that has to be organized as well. For example, if there is a problem with the database, PRTG should be able to alert the data administrators, not anybody else. Only they should take care of any pressing issues; if they don't, the method will go to the wrong person, which can be very damaging. There is a lot of human organization required in administering a method between technologies and that needs to be organized well for the network monitoring process to be effective.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine because everything has room for improvement. 

We use it to monitor services, things like hardware usage and whether hard drive space is running out. We use it for quite a lot of our networking solution as well. If there's a glitch in the network, anything that's abnormal, being able to see that show up is quite good.

The historical data provided by the solution helps optimize our network performance. We can see what's going on in our network infrastructure, more so in terms of our core networking. We can see which fiber links have been used heavily and, if they are used heavily, we can introduce more links to particular buildings or particular areas. It's more around the networking that we use the historical data. 

Also, if we have any issues with particular hardware, we can monitor those. We can monitor the network on those ports and come back with any issues or see if anything is flipping out or has stopped working. It's helpful being able to see that historical data.

It makes us more proactive, as opposed to reactive, with any issues. We tend to see issues occur before anyone else even knows about them. That's really useful for us. Particularly if there's any abnormality on the network, because of the historical data, we tend to know about it. PRTG tells us about anything that's out of the ordinary, which is good.

The sensors work well.

The remote probes seem to be a little bit buggy at times. They just stop working or they say they can't communicate. What we tend to do to is install the remote app onto the servers that we use. That seems to clear it up. As long as the app is there, all the probes seem to work fine.

It would be nice if, for the maps view - what you can lay out on the screens - there were a bit more functionality. It would help to be able to add titles to the top or to be able to change text sizes. There's not much you can really do with that in terms of configuration at the moment.

The stability has been good since it went in. It's never had any issues. It has just worked. It updates itself, it's easy to manage, easy to maintain.

It's difficult for me to judge the scalability. For what we use it for - I think we've got 1,000 sensors and we use about 800 or 900 at the moment - it all runs fine. I'm sure it would scale very well if we needed it to go any further than that. But for what we use it for, it's relatively small.

We haven't used the tech support or the online resources. It has always just worked; it's always been fine.

We have a third-party we go to if we get stuck with our network and they recommended PRTG. They actually started using it to troubleshoot some issues on our site, and from that, we decided it was something we wanted, so we invested in it from that point and set it up from scratch.

There wasn't really any system downtime which factored into our decision, but there were a few performance issues which PRTG helped us to solve. That was another reason to get it put in place, long-term.

The initial setup was surprisingly easy, the way the menus are all laid out. I set it up myself and it explained what to do, where to go. There were little pop-ups on the screen saying, "This is where to go for this, that's where to go for that." It made it all really easy to do. 

Also, adding servers or switches, it was auto-discovery, so I didn't have to do any config on that. You could just let it discover everything and then delete what you don't want.

It took about two days from the time I set up the solution until it provided feedback on our IT infrastructure.

PRTG was recommended to us and we went with it on the free basis to start with and then we moved to the paid version, for more sensors. We haven't really compared it to anything else, because it was recommended. Overall it seems very good.

Just install it, follow the instructions, and off you go. It just seems to work.

We do use the Desktop app and it's good, it works very well. It's very similar to the web-based system. It gets a little bit annoying sometimes because there are quite a lot of pop-ups. I'm sure we could turn them off but that's not something we've looked into. I actually find myself exiting the Desktop app, just to stop the pop-ups.

I wouldn't say that it has made our IT department more cost-effective at this point because, although we pay for it and we use it, we haven't really made any changes on the network because of PRTG. I don't think we've had any cost savings anywhere.

I would rate it eight out of ten. The desktop app seems a little clunky sometimes. There are a lot of pop-ups saying things are offline when they're not necessarily. That's more due to those probes. When we install the app on the servers there're no issues there, so we can get around that.

The features which I believe to be the most valuable for PRTG are its easy setup in general, including its alarm setup; along with its out-of-the-box monitoring checks.

The fact that it's simple to use network-based monitoring, and at the same time is reliable and robust.

This product in particular provided network traffic control, net SLA measurements which are always quite practical. Also, it allowed us to report downtime on sites in a very easy and comprehensive way.

Its most important quality, in my opinion, is that it's an out-of-the-box functional product. This means you won't need a lot of technical know-how to properly make it function, at least on a basic level. It's easy to configure and make an operator know how to interpret the information gathered and apply the information it reports.

They could improve on application monitoring, user defined OS sensors, its lack of agent defined monitoring. Also, they could include customized reports and network maps, more detailed SLA reports, better item relations. Lastly, they should improve on distributed monitoring for customers on remote networks.

What it offers is far from being enough. It's dashboards, GUI and reports are too simple for cases where you'd need advanced monitoring tools.

I've used it on two different sites for over three years.

None at all, I'd even say that it's the best thing about this program: you don't need to know about monitoring to make it run.

We've had no issues with the stability.

It does consume a lot of hardware resources, and over time you can notice it going slower. This is especially so when you've added/erased a large amount of checks, alerts or customizations from what are called "sensors" . Just like many Windows-oriented tools, you sometimes feel the urge of just resetting everything and starting over -but that's mainly because of how it handles during daily tasks- usually it doesn't have major issues with bugs or general usefulness.

I haven't had access to it, the client did not provide me with that information.

I haven't had access to it, the client did not provide me with that information.

I've worked with a large variety of solutions, mainly Zabbix, Nagios, Cacti and Pandora FMS. In this case I resorted to PRTG because the client already had a license for it. One of the times I had to set it up from scratch and the other time I had to take over an installation which was already functioning.

It was quite simple although, as always, you have to get used to the terminology used which is unofficial.

In both cases I had an In-house team.

It was quite good, considering the product is inexpensive for commercial standards and that it won't take a long time to learn to use properly.

It's a good product for simple environments, but its price/feature ratio scales rapidly in larger environments. In really complex or large environments, this product just isn't enough, it's lacking a lot of features that would otherwise be necessary for these types of environments.

generally work with open source solutions such as Zabbix, Nagios, Cacti or Pandora FMS. In this case it could be compared to WhatsApp Gold, but I think PRTG is more useful for compact and simple environments.

I would say that in general it's good software, yet I would advise newcomers about some of its limited features, but you can't really expect pinecones from a palm tree, if you know what I mean.

If you need a simple and solid tool, and you're willing to spend a buck, it's a good option to consider. It's a tool that's been tested and you can easily see what it is or is not meant for.

It is great for service level agreements and can comply fully with internet monitoring or any interface such as hardware or network interfaces and database instance. Irrespective of the MID, it can detect and monitor it. It is a vast platform and can make the cluster for the DC and DR. If one is down, it'll last shorter than the second one.

We prefer to use the PRTG because it has a low price. We provide solutions to the customer, and customers always prefer to pay less for the best output and quality. In addition, the solution allows customers to monitor anything within their network. For example, they can monitor their servers, application levels and virtualization instances.

The technical support service should be improved and is not as good as Cisco. However, PRTG support is better than before as they now have remote and TeamViewer support. Before, it was only based on mail communications and forum discussions. Irrespective of this improvement, the technical support response time is still prolonged, and the reservation can be better. I rate the response times a six out of ten. We've had very good experiences with Check Point, Juniper, and Cisco technical support.

Regarding additional features, currently, the default database has some limitations. There is a specific capacity that it can trigger. So, if they can make the enterprise-grade DV integrated, then a separate part will be needed to integrate. We want to customize every six months and do not need data older than six months.

It is the best solution. Personally, in my 20 years of experience working with monitoring systems, this is the best. Their software is very light and fast. Everything is great except the technical support response time. If they improve this, I'm sure it will be a top-class product competitor.

We have been using this solution since 2006. The price is user-friendly, and the monitoring system is sound. The solution has a clear advantage as it can monitor per second. We use the enterprise paid version.

It is a stable solution. The performance is excellent, and the reporting system is good. We can customize, and if we want to detect a particular time in demand or an outage for a service provider, we can easily identify it.

It is straightforward to scale, similar to SolarWinds.

The setup is very easy, and for someone with no experience, which a few clicks, they can figure it out. However, if you want to integrate at a wide level, it will require some experience. I rate the setup a ten out of ten.

The deployment was short and took just about two to three minutes.

We provide maintenance services to customers, and this solution is suitable for larger companies. Most of the companies we work with are banks and government organizations, and if we include the interfaces, we are about 4000. It is also suitable for smaller companies, which can easily purchase the solution with minimal cost.

Regarding ROI, we can easily use and afford the licensing costs for a small office of about 100 to 200 users. This is impossible from the NPM, as they have the minimum interface values they must process.

PRTG Network Monitor is a very affordable solution compared to other solutions. Other solutions cost nearly double or triple the cost. Not only is the pricing reasonable, but the quality is also.

The licensing cost depends on the number of interfaces. The details for the enterprise are published on their website, and because we partner with them, we receive a 15% discount. They do not customize their products for specific customers. Other solutions like SolarWinds and Cisco do not provide product customization support, but PRTG Network Monitor includes documentation for customization to the particular interface. For example, we wanted to monitor 300 SNMP nationwide and try to integrate them into the online UPS. It was very tough because no MIB value was published on their website. We had to request it, and they generated the script and made the MIB value, allowing us to initiate.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. Regarding advice, comparing WhatsUp Gold and PRTG and SolarWinds NPM, I would always recommend PRTG. They integrate a lot of features. Every month, we get the latest updates and better features within the support service and maintenance contract. The updates are free and included in the cost.

NPM is aware of the five-second values compared to other solutions, and PRTG has the first-second values, so it is very high. Therefore, for any incident within five seconds, PRTG can detect it. PRTG is the par, and it stands with the interface-based licensing category. But NPM's licensing category is different. It is the business policy of the individual which doesn't make sense.

Our primary use case is monitoring when our network fails, when a server goes down or a site goes down. We have five sites.

We're more proactive. Usually, we already know when something has gone down by the time we get the phone calls. When someone says, "We can't log in," or "We can't get on the internet," we probably already know about it.

It makes us, as an IT department, more "time-effective" and if time is a cost then it makes us more cost-effective. Rather than getting 20 phone calls, we can just send an email out, company-wide, saying, "We know this has occurred, we're looking at it." It's cost-effective, time-wise.

Its proactiveness is its most valuable feature. We already know when we come in, in the morning, if a server or site is down, as opposed to someone telling us. Before, we'd have to find out ourselves, check it ourselves, which we were not likely to do, realistically. I wouldn't come in, first thing in the morning and see if all the servers were up, are all the sites were up. It was not the first thing I'd do.

The sensors and remote probes are good. I've used them for a while. The sensors are good because you can change the length of time before they notify you. One of the problems we used to have was that we had it on 30-second alerts, so as soon as there was a slight network blip we would get an email. What's good is that they're adaptable.

Overall, the solution's feature set is really good. I've probably only used about ten percent of it. We use the Ping sensors and the bandwidth utilization sensors. We don't use half of the rest. What we are using is fairly key to what we do.

It probably has this already, but if it had a mobile app that would be helpful. For example, on a day like today when I'm out, if I could just fire it up and see green, green, green, green, green or red, that would be good.

The stability of the solution is very good. We've had no issues with it. It's pretty sound. It always works. I can't really fault it.

It is scalable. We've only got a small infrastructure, but if we had a larger infrastructure it would be fine. We probably only monitor 20 to 30 devices on it. We could do more but we don't.

I've never used their technical support, but I suppose that's a good reflection on the product itself.

I've used it for quite a while. I just played around with it initially, it's pretty intuitive. I might google the odd problem I've had with it, and how to do this, that, and the other but most the time it's intuitive enough.

We had system downtime before implementing the solution. I've been where I am now for about eight years. Before, there were issues all over the shop. I walked in and we had servers that had no disk space, which this product can look at. We had issues with poor connectivity to certain sites which this will obviously flush out.

One of the reasons we went with it is because I had used it before.

The only downside - and it's a minor thing - is when I've uninstalled it. I usually install it on a server to use the probe. When you uninstall it, it requires a reboot and sometimes it doesn't quite warn you enough that it's going to reboot the server, so you have to be very careful.

From the time we set up solution until it provided with us with feedback on the infrastructure was 20 minutes. Install it and it's working 20 minutes later.

It has a free trial so I would give it a go, you have nothing to lose really. Just try it. It doesn't take long to set up.

I rate PRTG at eight out of ten. I wouldn't go higher because I haven't investigated it, used it fully-optimized. But I'm really happy that it does what it needs to do.

We use it mostly for monitoring our servers, network equipment, firewall, etc.

The historical data provided by the solution helps us optimize our network performance. And where it comes in very handy for me is in problem solving. I need to look at what has been going on for the last week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, even months, and it gives me that information. I was having an issue at a particular time of day and it actually helped me fix the issue. It was absolutely invaluable.

We're a very small department so the need to find an issue quickly is important to us. PRTG has helped us with that a lot. It enables our IT department to be more cost-effective because we don't have to keep going through support departments.

It also provides us with needed feedback on our IT infrastructure. It is really critical to us to know what's gone down. I received an email the other day saying that one of our servers was down. It's very important to us to receive that information. I received it at ten o'clock at night and I was able to remote on and fix the issue before anyone had even noticed it had gone down.

The best feature is that it lets me know what is going on. I need to know if something has gone down, I need to know if something is running very slowly. PRTG tells me that.

I like the dashboard and the new feature which makes it a black dashboard. I also get emails and notifications, which I love.

The sensors and remote probes are very good. Sometimes they pick up far too much information, but I'd rather have far too much than not enough, so that's a benefit. They show the performance of hard drives and the like. How fast a process is going is critical information for our service. We have a 24/7 business so I need to know what's going on 24/7.

There seems to be a big jump from the basic scan to the really thorough scan. There is a big jump in the quantity of sensors it uses for certain things. One minute you might get ten and then the next you get 200. There seems to be a big jump between the two at times.

It's pretty stable. It's been up and running now for about two years, which is very stable. There has been the odd crash but that was more the server it was on rather than PRTG. It's very stable.

Scaling is very easy. You just need to buy licenses to increase the scale and away you go. It takes minutes to scale it.

I've never used their technical support. I've never needed to. I've never had problems that I couldn't fix myself.

I do use the knowledge base online quite a bit, so that might count as technical support, but I have never contacted support.

We used a free product, although I can't remember the name of it. It was good but it wasn't giving us the feedback we wanted, especially for alerts. As I said, for our company that's extremely important but we just weren't getting those alerts. We did some research, found PRTG, and I spoke to another company that used it. They really loved it so we went ahead got the free license initially, did a trial, found it absolutely amazing, and then bought it.

We went with it because of a good review from somebody I know, which is always a good start. Also, the price was pretty good, very competitive. Finally, we experienced system downtime before implementing the solution and that was a driving factor in our decision. We needed something to help us stop that from happening, or at least to alert us that it was happening.

The initial setup was dead-easy. It was just pretty much "next, next, next," put in some credentials, set up a scan with the IP addresses and away it went. There really wasn't much to it.

From the time we set up the solution until it provided us with feedback on our infrastructure wasn't long: two to three hours max. Even with setting up the probes, setting up the scan, and the IP addresses, it didn't take long, maybe a couple of hours.

I did it myself.

The ROI for us is time, massively. We had an issue a few weeks back, it was after work hours and we had a server that had gone down. I was at home and noticed it - got the alert - connected up and fixed the issue. Most people didn't even notice. If that had been left until the morning, there would have been big issues for directors, time and money, if that server had been down.

We looked at SolarWinds and we looked at NetManage but went for PRTG in the end.

I'd highly recommend PRTG. It's a very good product and the price is pretty good as well. Some of the others I looked at were very expensive.

I don't really use the Desktop app. I prefer to see the web-based version.

The overall feature set is very good. It can be a little memory-intensive, that's one downside as it does eat quite a bit of memory, but other than that, it's very good. It picks up all the sensors, does everything I need it to. I've not really found a product yet that it doesn't scan, which is great. Overall, really good.

I would never give a ten out of ten, but I will go with an eight. It is a little bit memory-intensive and sometimes it gives a bit too much information but, as I said previously, I'd rather have too much than too little so it's not too bad. I would give it a solid eight.

PRTG Network Monitor is used for monitoring internet service providers, and we want to receive the downtime of the network devices mapped. PRTG Network Monitor is hosted in a local host server in our three data centers.

The most valuable features of PRTG Network Monitor are user-friendly, and the graphical interface is good for all the network devices that are mapped in this organization. It's very easy to find reports for any devices that we are looking for.

PRTG Network Monitor can improve the reports. In the reports, you have to give an alert for that SMS and email, the emergency calls and downtimes have to be reported accordingly. You have to enable email services or an SMS gateway service to receive more alerts at the proper time.

I have been using PRTG Network Monitor for approximately four years.

PRTG Network Monitor is stable.

We have approximately 3,000 users using PRTG Network Monitor in our organization.

I have not used the support from PRTG Network Monitor.

The setup of PRTG Network Monitor is simple. The deployment can be done in a few hours.

We pay for PRTG Network Monitor annually. The price is approximately 10,000 rupees annually.

The solution performs well.

I rate PRTG Network Monitor an eight out of ten.